Violence as a Way of Life: An Anarchist Analysis of Gun Control and State Power in the US

Two members of the Black Panther Party are met on the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento, May 2, 1967, by Police Lt. Ernest Holloway, who informs them they will be allowed to keep their weapons as long as they cause no trouble and do not disturb the peace. Activist scott crow says the Black Panthers inspired his own theory of liberatory community armed self-defense.

According
to an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force memo, author and activist scott
crow is “… considered armed and dangerous. He is proactive in civil
disobedience skills and goes to events to instigate trouble.” Having
been involved in myriad organizations and direct actions ranging from
anti-racist to environmental to disaster relief, crow was under surveillance and
investigation by the FBI for at least three years for political
activity relating to anarchism, animal rights and environmental
activism. crow’s book Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective,
tells the harrowing story of going into New Orleans following
Hurricane Katrina, where he co-founded Common Ground Collective, now
known as the largest anarchist organization in modern history. Building
off his experiences in New Orleans with armed self-defense,
horizontally-organized disaster relief aid and FBI informants, crow is
the editor of the newly released anthology Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense.
In this interview with Truthout, crow discusses his experience with
armed self-defense, the current gun control debate, the student-led
protests on gun control, the militarization of police, the media framing
of police killings and the military-industrial complex.

Chris
Steele: Can you elaborate on your experience in New Orleans when you
engaged in temporary armed self-defense and what the result was?

scott crow: I
was one of two white men invited into part of the Black Algiers
community to take up community armed self-defense — from my
relationship with former New Orleans Black Panther Party chapter leader
Malik Rahim through our work to free political prisoners, the Angola 3.
They asked for armed support to protect themselves against white
vigilante groups and the New Orleans police that were out of control
before [Hurricane Katrina], and were more lawless after. What I saw when
we arrived was criminalization and indifference [toward poor, Black
communities all over the city] from government at all levels. Racism and
fear dominated the media and [the narrative] on the ground.

While
people were literally dying or suffering, the state put emphasis on
restoring “law and order” above saving or helping tens of thousands of
people. The police were turning a blind eye as the white vigilantes
calling themselves the “Algiers Point Militia” drove around in trucks,
drunk, with loaded weapons, intimidating and killing Black men on the
streets. My first duty on showing up to Malik’s was to cover a
bullet-riddled, shirtless dead body of a man with sheet metal. Who
killed him: the police or the white militia?

So, we organized a
community-based armed self-defense rooted in liberatory ideas. It
started with five of us: three Black men from the neighborhood and two
white men from Texas (one who would later become an informant for the
FBI against us). It evolved into protection and defense of the
neighbors within a few blocks, to the developing disaster relief spaces
and clinics we were building. Suncere Shakur — who took great risk as
a Black man from another city to take up arms with us — also guarded
Malik, whom the vigilantes were threatening.

In short, we ended
up in a brief armed standoff with the militia, and law enforcement
continued to harass volunteers and almost murdered me on four occasions
within the first month by putting guns to my head and threatening to
“blow my fucking brains out.”

From these rudimentary defense
efforts, we built a decentralized disaster response organization and
network called the Common Ground Collective (now known as Common Ground
Relief) to help defend and rebuild these communities with them.

Can you explain how these experiences in New Orleans led you to writing and putting together your latest book, Setting Sights?

Everything
is built on something that came before it; when we took up arms, we
were building on liberatory histories before us — from anarchist
ideals, the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Black Panthers. All of these
disparate tendencies gave us foundations to build from. I had also read
many other smaller stories over the decades of historically
marginalized groups or communities taking up temporary arms as part of
larger survival efforts, but realized that none of them had ever been
told together — as collective narratives with similar underpinnings.
From my actions in New Orleans and the trauma from it, I began a process
of reflecting on and developing the ideas of liberatory community armed self-defense as a theory.

And
remember, at the time this was happening in New Orleans, the so-called
left was almost virulently anti-gun and deeply in the methods of
nonviolence. We were almost seen as “illegitimate” for this praxis. The
ideas of community armed defense only found acceptance within largely
white anti-fascist networks I was part of, and in a handful of militant
Black radical traditions only.

With new attention and student-led protests advocating for gun control, where do you think the debate should start?

I think students — and all of us, really — have to fundamentally understand three things in talking about gun issues. One, that government is not going to make a violent society go away; only we will, by working together to shift culture in the ways we handle violence and conflict in this country. We live in a country founded and maintained by violence. We can ask, “What are the ways we can subvert and break the toxic cycles of both individual or personal violence, and state-sanctioned violence by entities like the police, military or court systems?”

Secondly, people need to see through the
political lies that laws will protect us. More gun laws don’t and won’t
always make us safer, especially relying on weak politicians who are
in the pockets of corporate arms dealers to enact substantive gun
reforms while they are being showered in money.

Thirdly, “law enforcement” officials claim to be against guns and for stemming
violence, but they themselves are more heavily armed than most
militaries around the world. Let’s not forget it was the FBI [and the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] who just two years ago —
in blatant disregard for human life as well as domestic and
international laws — armed Mexican drug cartels with high-powered
rifles which were used to kill innocent civilians on both sides of the
border.

The debate should start with questions that lead to
deeper conversations. How do — or can we — take this complex cultural
symbol, the gun, and decouple it from what it means to very different
people? How do we deal with violence in the US, including guns? What
responsibilities do we as individuals and communities want to take in
dealing with violence? Are there legitimate roles for firearms, and do
the benefits outweigh the challenges? How do we culturally shift from
guns being sold with fear and masculinity to something else?

Can you explain where liberatory community self-defense and gun control are compatible?

I
am not sure if they are, except in very limited ways. In the 30 years I
have been in the political sphere, I have been on both sides of this
debate. I used to unwaveringly support more gun laws, but like many
ills of society, I kept seeing stricter laws weren’t doing what they
intend, and only criminalizing people and communities already
marginalized. That said, I don’t think any of us have a magic answer to
these very deep and complicated issues that touch many lives in varying
ways.

Part of calling for a liberatory approach to community
self-defense is calling for sensible gun ownership. To me, that means a
few things, like that we are not all armed to the teeth; some in
communities may not even be armed at all, or it’s on a rotational
basis. We don’t need individuals or communities with access to guns
everywhere — laws or no laws. That community (whatever makes it a
community) must decide something important like that.

Another
aspect of the liberatory approach is that it hopefully challenges the
ways we engage in conflict and the toxic masculinity that is within
current gun culture, individually and in groups, especially with arms
involved. I believe if we begin to change our approaches to conflict
and violence, that these are pieces toward subverting the dominant
paradigms, just like any other cultural issue.

Even if the US did pass strong gun control reform like Australia, do you feel that gun violence in the US could be curtailed?

I
don’t think at this time that could ever happen in the US without a
lot of bloodshed from many groups of right-wing leaning people,
including white militias, sovereign citizens, neo-Nazis and even
spineless politicians, who at least claim that there would be
“bloodshed” if that happened. These are entrenched cultural norms
outside of liberal circles, tied to other cultural “conservative”
institutions like church or family that are deeply embedded. Removing
guns or any other part of that culture is seen as nothing less than an
attack, and people can do desperate things when they think they are
being attacked; just look at the standoff at Ruby Ridge in the 1990s.

Again,
that said, even though I have thought about these issues from multiple
angles for decades, I am still unsure of all the paths that will lead
us to stop mass shootings, and I don’t want to close the door.

How would gun control affect communities of color and liberatory armed self-defense communities?

We
can already see that current gun control laws disproportionately
affect poor [communities] and communities of color. For example, we have
been in a crisis in this country through mass shootings or workplace
shootings, which we should call it what it is: white male terrorism. And
still, law enforcement handles those killers differently from the
first time they arrive on the crime scene through the court phases (for
those that don’t kill themselves). In many instances, the perpetrator
can walk away without being shot, while police continue to kill Black
unarmed men almost daily. And if we look at the legal aspects, once
again, people of color are treated disproportionately unlawfully.

White
nationalists, neo-Nazis and “alt-right” fascists have continued to
murder and terrorize historically marginalized people and communities
to this day, stockpile weapons and call for mass genocide and
exclusion, but the FBI barely lists any of these individuals or groups
as terror threats or go after them. Instead, they chose to target Black
groups who armed themselves for protection, but have never killed
anyone, like the Huey Newton Gun Club or Rakem Balogun (born Christopher Daniels), as “Black Identity Extremists” instead.

A
liberatory approach challenges the assumptions that law enforcement is
unbiased or fair or even helpful to any communities, but especially
marginalized ones. It also starts with the assumption that these
communities know better how to be able to collectively defend themselves
from racist attacks, whether by the state or right-wing paramilitaries
like the militias.

You pointed out that Black people
are being killed on a near-daily basis by the police. Can you speak on
the recent police killings of Stephon Clark and Danny Ray Thomas, and
the acquittal of Alton Sterling’s killers? How these killings are
framed in the media? Where the gun debate is during this coverage?

I
can only speak to the larger patterns and histories of police
murdering Black people, and not individual circumstances. The media —
which we have to recognize is part of Power (which includes any entities
that have undue amount of influence or control on our lives) — almost
always fall lockstep into the larger narratives in these police
murders. First is justification. The media unquestioningly back the
“official law enforcement narrative.” Secondly, the media never question
the militarization of the police and their ability to kill unarmed
civilians without consequences. Lastly — and possibly most important —
is the often, inherent racism in how police respond to people that
possibly have guns and how they are portrayed. If they are Black,
narratives of “criminal” or “dangerous” are used, especially if the
police killed them; whereas in similar or worse situations involving
white men, [white perpetrators] walk away alive from it, and the media
portray them as “lone wolves” with “mental issues” or other sympathetic
tropes.

In corporate media portrayals, after the police kill
another innocent person, the gun debate only focuses on guns being in
the hands of so-called dangerous criminals, or other racist tropes that
hold the murdered individual to one standard while the police, as an
institution, are never questioned in their access to weapons or
ability to kill with almost impunity. Law enforcement can murder at
will without question in corporate media. They never ask questions like,
“Should the police be armed at all?” Instead, they perpetuate often
racist or sensationalistic coverage.

With the US having a
higher military budget than the next 10 countries combined, can you
speak on the military-industrial complex and how it is often left out
of the gun control narrative?

When the so-called gun debate is had, it’s always framed
as “individual’s rights” and rarely (if ever) about the killing
capacity of the military or law enforcement. We cannot have over 2
million people who served in the military and taught to kill with
weapons not be affected by that; and in turn, we cannot
pretend that violence is only a moralistic failure by individuals. It
is internalized by all of us in civil society. This country was built
on — and is maintained — by violence domestically and abroad, and
this is a national disaster.

If we keep funding war and
occupation everywhere, it will continue to reflect on elements of our
societies. Dismantle the occupying militaries, the policing and prison
systems. We’ve tried them, and they don’t work for most of us. Let’s
rebuild localized deeper and broader health care, education, family
support and other foundations of civil society that help us deal with
conflict individually and collectively to defend and liberate ourselves
on our terms.

NOTE: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Chris Steele co-authored an article with Noam Chomsky that was published in the latter’s book Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity.